Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to photo processing in social media and more particularly to social interaction data management for uploaded photos in a social media data processing system.
Description of the Related Art
Even prior to the development of the Internet, social collaborative technologies supported the ability of geographically distant individuals to communicate and exchange information through the use personal computers and advanced workstations. Almost from the first days of personal computing, online information services included e-mail capabilities, instant chat technologies, shared document repositories and bulletin board facilities so that globally distant end users could share documents and ideas. The advent of the Internet only improved the ease in which end users could collaborate despite the great distances separating the end users. But, the development of social media has changed the way in which individuals interact with one another over the Internet.
Originally, the Internet provided for a revolutionary way for geographically distant users to exchange information and documents without requiring all end users to utilize the same accessing client. Instead, end users were free to use any client available so long as the client supported the Internet protocol (IP) and the transport control protocol (TCP). Soon, thereafter, the search engine enabled those same distant users to search for a priori unknown information and then to retrieve the located information for viewing in a corresponding client. The development of social networking technologies, though, provided the ultimate spark causing the massive expansion of the Internet to now include nearly half of the world's population.
Social media generally includes a bundle of technologies that augment the content sharing nature of the internet by providing for the filtering of the content sharing population for each participant according to a corresponding social network. In social media, content once shared by a participant is limited in its distribution to only those recognized by the participant as present in a social network of the participant and then only those members of the social network permitted by the participant to view the shared content. Each participant in social media additionally may either further limit access to shared content to a subset of those in a corresponding social network, or oppositely, augment access to the shared content to individuals outside of the corresponding social network.
Shared content in social media generally includes textual remarks, though in many instances, shared content includes imagery, video, audio or documentation. As well, shared content in social media often is distributed by the participant with the intent to elicit responsive content by others permitted to access the shared content. Responsive content may be as simple as a selected sentiment such as a “like”, or as complex as contributed text, imagery, audio, video or documentation. Thus, a thread of social commentary may be attached to different social media content contributions provided by different participants.
In many social media applications, once content has been posted to social media, the responsive thread may then develop as responsive contributions are received by those permitted by the content provider to access the posted content. Even during the course of receiving responsive content, the content provider may edit the textual content so as to modify the original textual content. But, unlike a textual contribution to social media, in terms of the posting of an image, the entirety of a responsive thread will be lost if the image is subsequently removed and replaced by a different image.